Review: Comcast Mobile for iPhone

Comcast customers may have a love/hate relationship with their broadband service of choice, but the company has been making numerous efforts lately to expand its services in order to tip us a little more towards the "love" side. One of those expansions includes the recently-launched iPhone and iPod touch app aimed at customers who make use of all the company's services, including e-mail, VoIP, TV listings, and Comcast On Demand.

We were given the opportunity to play with the free Comcast Mobile app with all of the services enabled in order to test things out. While it may not be enough reason for someone to start subscribing to Comcast, it's a handy app to have if you're already a user of these services.

From the main screen (after you log in with your Comcast username and password), you can access your Comcast Inbox, your Address Book, your Digital Voice info, the TV listings, and Comcast's On Demand content. The Inbox not only displays your Comcast e-mail, it also shows how many voicemails you might have waiting in your VoIP box. In terms of an e-mail client, it's pretty run-of-the-mill, comparable to Gmail's iPhone interface, but tapping on your voicemails will play it right through the iPhone or iPod touch's speakers, which is cool.

The Address Book's neat feature is that you can import your iPhone's contacts so that they are merged with your Comcast contacts. From here, you can search your contacts by name, and tapping on someone's e-mail address will bring up a new message in the Comcast Mobile e-mail interface.

Why you would want to do this instead of simply sending someone an e-mail through the iPhone's native Mail client is somewhat beyond me, but if you're married to the idea of keeping your Comcast e-mail completely separate from your iPhone, then this solution works decently enough.

Through the Digital Voice section, you can see all the same information you might see on your iPhone's calling interface—except through Comcast's VoIP service instead. Outgoing calls, missed calls, and voicemails are all displayed here, and you can even change your call forwarding settings right from within the app.

Finally, the TV stuff. "The Guide" allows you to navigate through the TV listings by searching or casually browsing—you can change times and days easily to see what's on and when.

Tap on a show to read the description of that episode, see a list of showtimes, add it to your favorites, or share it with friends. You can also set reminders for when the show is about to come on.

The downside, as far as we can tell, is that you can't actually program your Comcast DVR through the iPhone app (something we hear you can do with the DirecTV app, which is apparently "totally awesome" according to other Ars staff members). Is it really that great that I can look at the listings while I'm out and about? (Note: If this functionality is present somehow and we have just missed it, please let us know.)

Finally, the Comcast On Demand part of the app allows you to watch movie trailers and... that's pretty much it. Again, this feature is mildly cool—we guess—but it's not mindblowing and it's certainly not a feature that's going to sell us on subscribing to Comcast. Movie trailers can be seen all over the Internet, even from the iPhone. However, we suppose if you're already in the app and in the mood to check out some new movies, then this is a convenient place to do so.

Overall, the app is a handy companion to your already-existing Comcast services—assuming you actually subscribe to all those things. Most of us on staff don't, though, so many of the app's features are a bit of overkill for us. But hey, it's free. Go download it and give it a try.